Category Archives: Crime Fiction

How the Light Gets In, published by Blackstone Audio at the end of August, is another fine example of the great partnership of author Louise Penny and audiobook narrator Ralph Cosham. It’s the ninth novel about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec.

If you haven’t heard of these books yet, where have you been? The author writes a unique blend of police procedural and cozy mystery that seems to please both literary fiction fans and suspense fans, as well as readers who “don’t read mysteries.” Louise Penny blends dark and light themes, using humor and the fully developed personalities of her characters to keep death and its attendant depression and despair from overwhelming the reader.

Also, the audiobook narrator Ralph Cosham, as I and many other audiobook listeners have said before, IS Armand Gamache. No other voice will do.

These books about Chief Inspector Gamache and his fellow homicide detectives, their families, and their friends in the remote village of Three Pines, are also a good example of why they should be called a sequence, not a series. “Series” used to mean that you could pick up any book – the first or the thirty-first – and find a complete story with just enough about the characters to get by on, and you would get the skinny on the characters in every book, because they stayed pretty much the same from one book to the next. It was often even different authors writing the books, all under the same pen name. Series books were formulaic, so readers familiar with the series would get what they expected and new readers could jump in any time with no problem.

Series books are different now. They are sequential in more ways than by publication date. Characters develop. Circumstances change. If you read a book out of order, you’re going to hit major spoilers for the book that came before. The main character could be married or newly divorced, thought dead, gone into retirement or come back out of retirement; secondary characters could actually BE dead, or be double agents, or be having an affair.

This is a problem for publishers, and librarians, and probably booksellers too. And not just because publishers seem to be unwilling to print the series titles in order inside the book anymore. We all want people to be as excited as we are that the latest book in one of our favorite series is out, but a reader who starts reading Louise Penny with How the Light Gets In is not going to have the benefit of understanding how events in the earlier eight books have built up to the crucial moments for Chief Inspector Gamache and his department that take place in How the Light Gets In.

So the bad news about these books being a sequence and not a series is: you need to start with Still Life and keep reading until you get to this one. The good news is: you’re going to love all of them.

If you’re an audiobook listener, you will want to listen to these! Even if you don’t like mysteries.

Most of this intriguing literary thriller, The Caretaker by A. X. Ahmad, takes place in the off-season on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and in the Boston and Cambridge area, where the author (now in Washington, DC) attended MIT, so there are many familiar references for readers familiar with Massachusetts, but also an added layer of difference – a slight foreignness – because the places are seen through the eyes of the main character, Ranjit Singh, a Sikh from India – ex-Indian military – who has been in the U.S. for under three years.

Ranjit (pronounced with the “a” as in “arm” and the “i” as in “it”, emphasis on the first syllable) and his family have struggled to start a new life in the U.S. after a career disgrace in the military. For the past six months on Martha’s Vineyard, Ranjit worked as an independent landscaper, but now winter is coming on, the tourists have left, and it looks as though he will be forced back to working in his wife’s uncle’s cramped Cambridge shop. So when the wife of a popular African-American senator he did landscaping for offers him a job keeping an eye on their expensive house during the off-season, he leaps at the chance to stay on the island.

When he lands a second caretaking job on the strength of the senator’s reference, things seem to be looking up for Ranjit, his unhappy wife Preetam, and his Americanized young daughter Shanti. The prejudice and suspicion that his dark skin, beard, and turban engendered in parts of Boston he has infrequently encountered on Martha’s Vineyard, where there is a longstanding colony of African-American elite and a tradition of what the author describes as “the island’s easy tolerance.”

From this somewhat hopeful beginning, the story covers a lot of ground in 10½ hours of audio (or just under 300 pages) including flashbacks to Ranjit’s time as an army captain on the Siachen Glacier – a high-altitude Himalayan battleground on the disputed border of India and Pakistan – and problems mount quickly for Ranjit, who hadn’t realized how expensive life on the island would be. (Now he understands why most of the foreign migrant workers leave in the winter.) Amid a rash of burglaries on the island, the senator’s house is broken into, but this break-in doesn’t fit the pattern. In the senator’s house, the thieves seemed to be looking for something in particular. When they don’t find it, they decide Ranjit must have it. Now they need to find Ranjit.

Sam Dastor, a British actor, narrates the audiobook; he was surprisingly hard to find information about. He was born in 1941 in Mumbai (known to the rest of the world as Bombay, at the time), and has played roles both of Indians and of Englishmen. This explains how he does the voices of the Indian characters in The Caretaker so convincingly, while the American accents seem a little less natural. The rest of the book is narrated with a British inflection that is very well suited to the story. The women’s voices (Ranjit’s wife and the senator’s wife) verge on the falsetto and, unfortunately, makes the American-inflected voice of Ranjit’s spirited nine-year-old daughter Shanti really grating in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, until I read the AudioFile review which called it “singsong” and that’s it, exactly. In the end, I decided, the excellence of the male voices (which make up the bulk of the story) and the rest of the narration, outweighed the shortcomings in the female voices, but I wouldn’t recommend The Caretaker to someone venturing into audiobooks for the first time.

I enjoyed The Caretaker as a thriller-style variation on the Indian-immigrant-to-America theme. The numerous Indian references are easy to understand from context or get explained. Even though, as in most thrillers, some of the plot points seem a little unbelievable and there are (inevitably?) a couple of sex-in-times-of-danger scenes, the author brings in issues of undocumented immigrants, international politics, personal ethics, race relations, Sikh religious beliefs, patriotism, and the delicate balance of individual initiative and subservience in military and public service – without slowing down the action of the book too much.

Over all, the book’s themes are dark and complex, and the distinctions between good characters and bad characters are, at times, murky, which would be why this book is billed as a “literary” thriller. (By the standards of the American thriller genre, the guy in the turban who looks like he might be Arabic is probably going to be the bad guy, not the main character.) It’s not literary enough to make this a personal favorite, but the author has made a successful leap into popular fiction and I would happily listen to The Caretaker‘s sequel, which I would bet is in the works.

The Black Box is Michael Connelly‘s 18th crime novel about Detective Harry (short for Hieronymous) Bosch of the Los Angeles Police Department, part of the Robbery/Homicide Division’s Open-Unsolved unit. This audiobook edition has a new narrator, which I hadn’t noticed before I started listening. I had a few confusing moments while I wondered if I had the wrong audiobook (“Where’s Harry?!”) and then realized there was some interloper named Michael McConnohie reading instead of Len Cariou. (I think Bob over at The Guilded Earlobe probably tried to give a heads-up, but I only skim reviews until I’ve read the book, so I missed the news or blocked it out.)

Now, even though I’d been through this traumatic experience before – back at Book #5 or thereabouts, whenever Len Cariou took over from original narrator Dick Hill – it was still a shock! It took me at least an hour to settle into hearing the story in a new voice. Michael McConnohie seemed to speak too deliberately, at first, and just didn’t sound at all like the gruff, 20-year veteran Harry Bosch, but after a while, I had to acknowledge that Michael McConnohie was doing a decent job of it.

In The Black Box, Harry Bosch at age 60 takes on a cold case that he himself was one of the first detectives called to the scene on, twenty years before – the execution-style murder of a female, foreign journalist. At the height of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when police investigators were overwhelmed by the chaos and confusion of a city in turmoil, detectives were hurried from one crime scene to the next; Bosch was taken off the case and it was never solved.

The author tries to give enough background on Harry Bosch, his taciturnity, his military service, his mission to catch killers, his family life, and his on-again, off-again love life that each new Harry Bosch novel might be enjoyed on its own. But The Black Box is the 18th book in this 20-year series, and you’d be missing out on a lot of history if you start here.

If you like the dark determination of Henning Mankell’s Swedish detective Kurt Wallender or the gritty realism of John Harvey’s English police detective Charlie Resnick (like Harry, a lover of jazz) but haven’t read any of Michael Connelly’s books yet, it’s time to check out the American master of the police procedural.